Looking Back on Your Life: How are You Answering These 3 Questions?

As we begin the last week of our first month of 2017, I’d like to challenge you to reconsider the points we explored in creating more meaningful goals for ourselves this year. During the last month, we’ve explored the challenges of traditional New Year’s resolutions and I’ve offered some fresh alternatives to renew the process in order to create authentic, achievable intentions.

In week 1, we discussed how resolutions are typically created from the surface level of our minds, where our ideas tend to be short sighted and shallow. We challenged ourselves to go deeper and expand the boundaries of our comfort zones by creatively exploring the thinking behind our objectives.

In week 3, we utilized this newfound “Inner Hero” persona to reflect back over 2016 and determine the aspects that we would like more of and less of. We challenged ourselves to use this information to design our personal manifestos for 2017.

In week 4, we courageously admitted that some of our habitual behaviors lead to living small lives. We challenged ourselves to identify our core values and analyzed them against our current behaviors, then eventually altered those behaviors to start living a life more closely aligned with our values. This goal helps us achieve the biggest impact possible.

I hope these segments have proven helpful in redesigning your 2017 ambitions. The purpose of this series was to move you closer to becoming the person you were meant to be and living the life you were called to live. In the everyday humdrum of military life, we can often lose contact with those aspirations.

However, at the end of our lives, none of us are going to look back and wish that we lost more weight, or worked harder, or drove a better car. The superficial goals we placed upon ourselves to achieve will quickly fade away leaving us with pure clarity.

The elemental concerns that will be important to us at that time, though quite personal, are universal:

How satisfied am I with the person I chose to be?

In what ways did I love those around me well?

What positive impacts did my life make?

We can take steps toward those ideas now by making purposeful choices in who we are being and how we are living, then adjusting ourselves accordingly. In fact, if you only endeavor to answer those three questions every once in a while, and make small modifications in response, you are already committing to doing very hard work.

May your 2017 be full of ideas, words, and actions that move you forward toward the ultimate dream of living a life that mattered. May we all journey onward in this collective spirit of unity hand-in-hand.

How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions? Share your progress with us!